I mentioned this in a previous blog post, and that at some point in time I would sit down, re-edit the manuscript, and maybe share it with the blogosphere.

I thought about it last night. I remembered how I thought that someday this could be a decent motion picture, or maybe a bestselling book. Then after a few moments, I changed my mind. I had other things to deal with, like employment and fatherhood and the like – things that didn’t require living on dreams and fantasies.

So I put the one copy I had of the manuscript in a manila envelope, sealed it up, and stuffed it in a storage box. And found it again last night.

I looked over the thesis. 25 years of storage made all the typos and awkward sentences rise to the top, like cream in a milk bottle. Before I shared this with anybody, it needed some serious work. Chapters needed rewriting, characters needed strengthening, and, for all intents and purposes, I needed to get re-involved with the story.

So I made the commitment. Nearly 200 pages of text, all printed out from a daisywheel printer in 1985, went through a flatbed scanner and imported with OCR technology. I saved the final product as a .TXT file, so that I could edit out any typos or formatting issues.

The final word count was something like 44,000 words of text. I put that in a blog post and the Times-Union’s servers would melt.

So here’s what’s going to happen. As soon as the manuscript is rewritten, I’m going to serialize it on this blog, one chapter a week – possibly printing on Saturday or Sunday. It’s going to be available for free reading, with the understanding that this is personally copyrighted material and not to be redistributed without the author’s consent.

Serializing novels is nothing new for the Times-Union; they used to serialize books and short stories 100 years ago in their print edition. This is just an extension of that same feature.

The first chapter should show up on this blog in a few days. I hope everyone enjoys it.